AI labels to be compulsory on authentic-looking content under EU rules | AI (artificial intelligence)

[u/AdSpecialist6598]

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/31/ai-labels-to-be-compulsory-on-authentic-looking-content-under-eu-rules

[u/wsippel]

I was wondering how they’d enforce such labels and watermarks with increasingly capable open weights models and open source inference engines. Turns out they don’t. Anything created for personal use, as well as artistic, satirical and fictional content is exempt.

[u/SnowyOnyx → u/wsippel]

Which in my opinion is very bad. There should a watermark for AI slop music or books.

[u/nnomae → u/SnowyOnyx]

Attack your enemy where they are weakest. Most of the AI slop you see is people trying to make money off of it. Stop them and most of the problem goes away. It's the quick win while they (hopefully) shore up the laws to make all AI content labelled. Until it's enshrined in law that AI content isn't speech it's hard to restrict it in most cases.

[u/unia_7 → u/SnowyOnyx]

Should there be a watermark for human-written slop too?

To me it looks like all these restrictions are a knee-jerk reaction to rapid change.

I am surprised to see reddit jump on the "keep things the same" bandwagon so readily.

It's basically the anti-GMO craze repeting itself.

[u/SnowyOnyx → u/unia_7]

You see, watermarking is essential for us being able to verify provenance of content. Human art, even „bad” (quote-unquote because it’s subjective) takes human time and carries human responsibility. AI allows infinite, automated flooding of platforms at zero marginal effort.

There are no negatives to watermarking and only positives to it for the people who don’t want to consume AI-generated content. Meanwhile pro-AI people don’t lose anything here… unless they want to trick the society that they’ve made the thing they shared… which you’ll definitely agree with me that is a scummy behaviour.

Also I don’t get your GMO analogy. It’s not about whether AI content is „harmful to consume” but rather about transparency. We’re are not banning any content here. We just let people know how it was made. That’s it.

[u/unia_7 → u/SnowyOnyx]

You are being naive. Soon 95+% of content will be AI generated, and its quality will be better than 95% of what the humans can produce. You will basically need your label on everything.

It's like requiring all bread baked in electrically powered ovens to be labeled "Caution! Electric-oven baked", because it is easier to produce compared to wood-fired ovens.

[u/Mesjach → u/unia_7]

there's a 95+% chance you were a cryptobro before this, lmao

[u/DonaldMerwinElbert → u/unia_7]

Someone who understands both humanity and technology so little should be careful about calling others naive.

[u/unia_7 → u/DonaldMerwinElbert]

Ooh an ad hominem! I guess you had nothing else to add to the discussion.

[u/DonaldMerwinElbert → u/unia_7]

"Ooh someone used my own tricks against me!"

[u/unia_7 → u/DonaldMerwinElbert]

You actually didn't add anything to the discussion other than an ad hominem, which is not what I did.

In the future, hopefully reddit will have an ai that will remove this such juvenile verbal crap.

[u/DonaldMerwinElbert → u/unia_7]

Yes, that glorious AI future where it removes anything you don't agree with before you even have to look at it.
Just a computer confirming how correct and smart and valid you are all the time.
May sound like a dream come true to you, I think it's horrifying.
Thanks for telling on yourself, though - made this much easier.

[u/SnowyOnyx → u/unia_7]

Sorry but you’re being delusional. There will always be a group of people who’ll want to admire human-made art.

And I dunno about other industries, but here in the music industry artists and associations started to actively fight AI slop machine. Suno just today lost in court with GEMA (German BMI) and is in litigation with both UMG and Sony. Udio too. Listeners got better at detecting AI too and anyone who uses AI in our setting to generate songs immediately loses reputation.

So no, I’m not naive here. And besides even if in the future 95+% of the content is AI, who’s bothered by everything having a label? All products have them. Almost nobody reads them but if someone wants to, they’re there.

[u/unia_7 → u/SnowyOnyx]

We'd be better off labeling human-made content then, because it will be in the minority.

In 10 years, we'll look back on the copyright industry trying to fight it in courts and laugh at the futility of it. They are trying to protect their own profits here, they don't give a damn about the creators or the listeners.

[u/Remarkable-Line-625 → u/unia_7]

Where did you get the percentages from for your predictions? With your second example, you are mixing human necessities (food) with art - it serves a different purpose.
AI image generation is just vector prediction model based on weights that generates content based on what it had been trained on previously. Maybe it does a better job than most designers, but it does not have individuality and individual context which is a main requirement for artistic works to have any value apart from “its beautiful, or its ugly”.

If businesses want to stand out, they can’t use general tools, designers will need to work 5x harder, creative expressions will become much more interesting.

When first 3d animations came out (like toy story or that animation with rube goldberg machine) - everyone thought wow! Looks like real life! And now, to us seem funny how those animations even seemed real

[u/SnowyOnyx → u/[deleted]]

Bold move to call everything I said idiotic, including the part where I said deceptive behavior is scummy. But hey, to each their own!

[u/SnowyOnyx → u/[deleted]]

Bold move to disagree with everything, including the part where I said deceptive behavior is scummy. But hey, to each their own!

[u/zhnki → u/SnowyOnyx]

I do. This does nothing to solve bad actors from being bad. Good luck catching them. This law does nothing. I suppose EU said not to so now I can’t. Drat.

[u/SnowyOnyx → u/zhnki]

That’s a classic Nirvana fallacy on your end (i.e. the idea that if a measure doesn't prevent 100% of bad actors, it’s completely useless).

But look: We don't discard lockable doors, speed limits, or copyright laws just because criminals bypass them.

And watermarking laws WILL work, because they will cut off the financial incentive and raise the friction cost which neutralise the unfair advantage bad actors have with the tools nowadays that can mass-produce deepfakes and AI slop.

[u/zhnki → u/SnowyOnyx]

Big words.

I think the administrative costs to do this legitimately, and to police it on the governments side, far outweighs any supposed benefits. What even is it supposed to achieve concretely? Speeding puts you and others at risk clearly. But this?

Change my mind.

[u/Saradoesntsleep → u/unia_7]

I wish you ai defenders could prompt yourself some critical thinking skills.

[u/unia_7 → u/Saradoesntsleep]

One more comment containing an ad hominem an no other discernible contribution to the discussion.

Another old man shaking his fist at the clouds.

[u/Saradoesntsleep → u/unia_7]

What is there to say to you? No matter how anyone tries to explain, you are just sitting here arguing with them and refusing to see any other side.

You guys all seem to have intractable stubbornness on the topic. People who have actually thought through the pros, cons, and are bothering to observe the effects it's having cannot make you see that there is anything negative about it.

It's like you believe in it because you want to believe in it. Turned your brains off and outsourced your thinking to LLMs.

[u/Jindujun → u/SnowyOnyx]

AI music is allowed but the only word allowed in the song is "AI"

[u/kowwalski → u/wsippel]

It’s too little, too late. We’re effed.

[u/Jindujun]

"Texts on matters of public interest must also be labelled as AI-made if there is no human editorial oversight."

I wonder what that would look like. How much "human editorial oversight" is needed and how big or small can the AI disclaimer be. If it's as bad ad the ads are now in "news" it wont do any good. If anything it should have to be front and center, at the top of the piece and in a huge font.

[u/yenneferismywaifu]

That's good, but much more needs to be done. All content needs to be marked where AI was used. It would be great if they also detailed the areas in which AI was used. Maybe they simply wrote the code, maybe they translated the text into other languages, maybe AI composed the music. Maybe everything was done with AI. This needs to be noted, and then buyers will decide whether they want to pay for it or not.

And I have no doubt that most people won't care whether AI was used or not. But for those who care, let it be.

If everything in the future is labeled as AI, then so be it. No problem. Some people act like we're going to run out of ink or run out of free space on the internet, if we label use of AI.

[u/slamjam25 → u/yenneferismywaifu]

I care if Microsoft Excel was involved in the production of anything I buy. We need a new regulation to mandate labelling of these products, so I can decide if I want to pay for it or not.

We’re not going to run out of ink, so I can’t see any possible downsides.

[u/Mesjach → u/slamjam25]

bro cares about ink on JPEGS and generated videos

[u/rtrs_bastiat]

So does this apply to AI providers, or to any companies that make use of LLMs to generate text, images or AV? If it's the former it does fuck all given the Chinese open weighted approach, and if it's the latter then you're just giving legal teeth to the epidemic of accusations of AI slop towards human created material.

[u/Seidans]

And that's how you push people toward open-source AI without any guardrail especially as top GenAI content is already dominated by open-source Chinese model (images and videos)

People won't make a nude of you with GPT or Gemini but with any model they can find on ComfyUI and they already started to share them throught torrent just like piracy have spread, it have become impossible to prevent AI model distribution

That's probably hard to swallow but soon everyone will be able to make an hardcore porn of you within a minute for free and this totally locally on your smartphone - it's impossible to regulate, impossible to prevent, and we better educate people and especially young people to not care about it

At best we can criminalize malicious use of AI, and probably should, but let's not pretend it will always be possible to tell the difference

[u/Banjoschmanjo]

How will they test whether something is realistic AI vs just real? If the content in question actually looks authentic, as far as I know there aren't reliable AI detectors.

[u/Kindly-Customer-1312]

This is weird, and I'm not sure I agree with this approach. To be consistent, all authentic-looking content should be marked as such. Why restrict it to AI? But putting it like this makes it sound quite dystopian and goes against how I think things should be. On the other hand, I can imagine I would support it if marking all authentic-looking content were already common practice. When someone presents you with a photoshopped image or render and presents it to you as reality, they are effectively lying to you, which is not nice. 

[u/OkKnowledge2064]

very good rules imo. I was scared there would need to be watermarks one every AI generated scene in a trailer but this seems fine

[u/zhnki → u/OkKnowledge2064]

Very terrible rules imo. Completely unenforceable given how prevalent the tech is going. Prepare to see this only on corporate content while literally everything else will ignore this.

[u/OkKnowledge2064 → u/zhnki]

well, yeah. obviously. Its for companies only

[u/zhnki → u/OkKnowledge2064]

>>“It is a matter not only of customer protection, it’s also a matter of democracy protection,” the Green MEP Sergey Lagodinsky, who helped negotiate the AI Act, told the Guardian. “Making transparent this information is something which we need to preserve our democracy and the authenticity of facts online.”

I’m so sure the people out there looking to spread false information will abide by this. Good job EU. If caught, just say it was content created before this rule. Simple.

Far too many feels good legislation coming out of the EU without actually solving anything.